Be Excellent To Each Other

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/A ... ref=slogin

Holy shit!

Wowsers!

"Just last week Gono introduced a new 100 billion-dollar note that is not enough to buy a loaf of bread."

How could you profiteer on money dropping in value btw?

I've always argued that we should do the opposite. It would be awesome to be paid millions and millions just for the fun of it.

(Via changing Pound to Million Pound - not via hyperinflation - oh an I would except changing 'pound' to 'awesome pound' too.)

Overcharge after the price has gone down (although quite how you'd get someone to pay you is beyond me).

That doesn't sound easy to do at all.

Would that involve the issue of 'new dollars' and a recall of all the 'old dollars'?

How would anyone notice?

Duh - the country is currently in a state of unbridled joy.

I've long thought that we should unitise pound amounts - so 1000 pounds would be 1 MegaPound, and so on. That would be awesomes.

It's very reminiscent of the Germany Hitler inherited.

He could get out of it by just blaming a wealthy minority, then stealing all their stuff and set himself up as a dictator, whilst encouraging Racial Hatred and attacking people who don't support him.

Oh.

No, they would just assume the old dollars to have the new worth, just as we did for 30 odd years with "1 shilling" coins.

They have an expiry date anyway (no seriously, your money expires and becomes, even more, worthless about 6months after printing) so it's a short term problem.

Now a 1000 pound would be 1 kilopound. A million quid would be a MegaPound.

Nevertheless this is an excellent idea and should be adopted immediately.

Unfortunalty I only have about 50 centipound (50p) on me at the mo.

Ah-ha! You spotted my deliberate mistake. Well done, sir!

"We don't want to place our country under emergency rule,'' Mugabe said, hoping he'd be able to place his country under emergency rule.

Gigapounds would be ace. Uberquid!

Also, I am a little disappointed that this thread wasn't about some sort of reverse lottery for the idle rich.

"Dear BETEO, how do I 'be' Gono?" ~ Alistair Darling.

So that's about $35,000,000,000 a month then?

It'd all be well and good until someone amasses a fortune of a "terapound" and then they'd be accused of being Osama Bin Laden and locked away for life.

That's already happened to an unfortune Eve Online player.

Not even close

Who do I write to to get some Zimbabwe currency?

I'd like to buy a 50,000,000,000 ZWD note.

You can buy it off ebay pretty easily. That's about your only option, it's illegal to export it.

Ha! How ironic that they're actually worth something on there http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Zimbabwe-100-Bill ... 0252808971 33 quids!

Yeah, that's probably partly why they have it illegal.

Mexico had done a similar thing just before I visited in 1996... they had 'New Pesos' which knocked things down a 1,000-sized notch. The end result was that prices looked about normal (NP$4.95, etc) as opposed to the bemusement of handing over 495,000 pesos for a cheeseburger.

Zimbabwe did this only 2 years ago though (Although I think that was "only" 6 zeros). And even the new prices result is roughly $20 for a loaf of bread already.

the thing, doing it one time isn't that bad (in the the last decade it happened to the zloty and the turkish lira), but if they have to do it agian in a few years...

74,071,043,468.34 ZWD a month.

Still, that's only 2,389,388,498.98 ZWD a day. That's less than a packet of crisps you know.

That ebay auction for the 100 billion ZWD is currenty worth £46.67.

Which translates to....

1,726,571,055,940.08 ZWD

By my reckoning that's 1.7 trillion dollars or 17 times its value. Not bad.

*wonders what the 1 gilder coin in his bedroom drawer is worth*

FTFY. Inflation over there is so out of control that it won't be long before the new currency hits those lengthy zeros either.

Officially 2.4 million%, Guestimated in reality at 9mil or so.

Short version, prices double every day.

Several countries have suffered massive inflation in the last decade or so - Turkey was another that wiped six zeros off the currency as the exchange rate when I last went there about four years ago was about 3.5m to the pound. In this instance it probably would have made economic sense to try and smuggle several tons of their loose change out of the country as the scrap value would have been an order of magnitude over it's monetary value.

I almost posted about Zim last week when I spotted the story on the front page of the guardian about the 1bn note - apparently inflation was running at 40m%

40 million % inflation? What does that even mean?
Surely by that point everyone should have given up on money altogether and gone back to bartering and violence as currency.

They did though, didn't they? It's only Mugabe and his be-suited cronies sat in their government offices who are pretending that there's anything approaching the usual mechanisms of state still in effect.

my paper wrote on saturday that mugabe is having a problem with printing new money (next to the problem that is printing more by itself):
- the companies with supplied him with paper, don't do that anymore (part boycot, part he doesn't pay the bills)
- the license of the software for the printing machines is revoked
- there will be interesting security issues, as you can see the pape rused now for the 100 billion is the same as the old 1000? , which you can see by the watermark

how the hell can mugabe get away with this shit, when we went and bombed Iraq back to the stone age for doing nothing?

Mugabe doesn't have any oil, so we don't care.

(unofficial version)

but zimbabwe has masses of open land perfect for farming ("the breadbasket of africa"). If we could just sniper that twat in charge, farmers could get back to growing food to feed people. I have a plan...

NATIONALISE ZIMBABWE!

I was screaming this before we got anywhere near Iraq. Life under Saddam for the ordinary folk was still many leagues better than it is now or is likely to be for a very long time.

Likewise. I've yet to hear anyone come up with a good answer for that apart from "OMG WTF WMD", which we all know was bollocks anyway. So they fall back on "he was a dictator!", and then you point out that Mugabe is as well, and it all goes round in circles.

The WMDs would seem to be the only possible justification if you assume they believed it.

Which puts us back to "So wait, he's not allowed them but you, the only country that has EVER used one in anger, is? That's super."

So it still doesn't work.

Moreover (for those who claim that it's okay for the US to have them, because they're not run by aggressive maniacs. I know, I laughed as well), you need merely fold your arms and say "oh really? North Korea."

And Israel, Pakistan, India... all liable to start or get involved in a war, too.

And this is if we're only talking about nuclear weapons. A large number of countries have biological or chemical weapons, which can be fairly unpleasant. But that does lead us on to the question of what, exactly, a weapon of mass destructinon actually *is*.

This old article by Lewis Page at El Reg (an ex Navy bomb disposal officer)makes a good argument as to why chemical weapons aren't anything of the sort, given that you can kill far more people far more quicky and cheaply using a bunch of artillery shells.

Is it midnight yet?

I think we're still placed as being a couple of seconds off.

That nuclear armageddon clock has always pissed me off immensely, being, as it is, utterly made up bullshit consisting entirely of the opinion of a couple of scentists as to how likely they think we are to have a nuclear war.

It always seems a bit random - according to it we're closer to full scale war now then we were at the peak of the Cuban Missile Crisis.